Nathaniel Hawthorne And Transcendentalism

The Not So Extraordinary Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne Nathaniel Hawthorne was a very ordinary man, who lived an extremely ordinary life filled with extraordinary talent. Although he lived a simple life and never ventured too far away from home, he left his mark on American literature. Through his changing ideals and religious background, Hawthorne created a large variety of literature that impacted mass amounts of people. Eventually, one of his works became one of the very first, mass produced American novels, selling thousands of copies in its first two weeks of being released. From his transcendentalist beginnings, to the writing of The Scarlet Letter, to his many smaller literary pieces, Hawthorne was a man of influence. Nathaniel Hawthorne

In 1838, Hawthorne became engaged to Sophia Peabody, the one and only love of his life. However, right after their engagement, Hawthorne took off and joined a transcendentalist community, waiting an additional four years to marry Miss Peabody. Transcendentalism was a massive movement in Hawthorne’s time and was a movement away from Puritan beliefs due to its fundamental belief that people are inherently good but are corrupted by society and its various institutions, corrupting their purity, which is the opposite of Puritan belief. Nonetheless, despite Hawthorne’s upbringing, he greatly supported the transcendentalist movement becoming a contemporary of the fellow transcendentalists: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott; making Hawthorne a large component of this prominent circle of Massachusetts writers and philosophers. Additionally, Hawthorne was a founding member of Brook Farm, which was one of the first experimental, transcendentalist, utopian, and communal living area. Yet, despite all of his changing viewpoints, upon return from his experimenting, Sophia Peabody was waiting for him and they got married promptly. After marrying, the couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, later moving to Salem, the Berkshires, and finally, to The Wayside in Concord. Through all of these moves,

For example, although Hawthorne started out with a Puritan background and eventually became a transcendentalist for much of his young adulthood, he obtained a darker view of life in his later years. Many of his first works were based off the belief that people are inherently good, but he began to stray away from this belief system the more and more he aged. As he aged, Hawthorne embarked on quite a remarkable journey, going from one extreme philosophy to another. He became more of a “Dark Romantic” in his later years, believing in his transition, that instead of people being inherently good, they are prone to drifting easily into sin, are deeply fallible, and tend to have major detrimental lapses in judgement. The irony of his massive transition escalates as Hawthorne realizes that some of society’s greatest sins are committed under an umbrella of good intentions. He slowly came to the realization that people hide the darkest parts of themselves and are inherently evil, leading to his authoring of, The Scarlet Letter. Overall, Hawthorne’s transition in his mindset and beliefs could be described as a coming of age story as he metamorphized from an optimistic idealist to a pessimistic realist who had become weathered by the world and the actions of those who dwell in it; for even those who seem to be good are